Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,10
salesman, he might have enjoyed a much steadier life. But what made Sanders truly great is that he wasn’t just a victim of creative destruction, he was an architect of it as well. One oft-scribbled note in the marginalia of American popular culture is that Harland Sanders wasn’t a real colonel. That’s true insomuch as he never led troops into battle or ordered an illicit Code Red. But the designation itself is real. A Kentucky governor can bestow the title “Kentucky colonel” upon anyone deemed deserving. And in 1935, Ruby Laffoon—Kentucky’s tremendously namely governor, who was directly preceded and followed in office by Flem Sampson and Happy Chandler, respectively—commissioned Sanders with the ceremonial honor, supposedly for his exploits as an amateur midwife.*
What separates Sanders from the countless other Kentucky colonels is that he went Method into the role of colonel with a fidelity that makes Daniel Day-Lewis look like kind of a punk. Sanders became the Colonel, first in a black suit and then in his trademark white suit, which matched his hair and a goatee that some historians suggest he dyed white. Wherever he went, he would engage in some “coloneling,” making strategic small talk and enhancing the Sanders mystique one table, community picnic, Rotary Club meeting, and social outing at a time. Over the years, the Colonel had prospered and extended his reach—in business, branding, and, of course, chicken.
Among his many projects in Corbin, Sanders endlessly tinkered with the perfect way to make chicken. Frying it in a pan took half an hour, too long by any service standard, but especially for a small highway joint with a time-pressed clientele. And so he labored with Bertha, his beloved first pressure cooker, retrofitting her with valves and risking life and limb to find a way to fry chicken faster and better. Miraculously, Bertha cut the cook time from thirty minutes down to just nine through a pressure frying method that locked out grease and sealed in juices.* Equally crucial, his chicken came coated in a batter made of a secret blend of herbs and spices that Sanders had refined again and again, mixing ingredients into piles of flour on the concrete floor of his back porch.
The chicken was a revelation; the result was poultry in motion. The Sanders Café flourished, later recommended as “a very good place to stop en route to Cumberland Falls and the Great Smokies” in Duncan Hines’s prestigious national guidebook, Adventures in Good Eating. Ironically, Sanders’s informal exploits in the kitchen had begun strictly as a means to better eke out a living during the Great Depression. “I figured I couldn’t do worse than these people running these places around town,” he told one biographer. But, unwittingly and in a very American way, Sanders’s efforts as a chef, entrepreneur, salesman, and marketing whiz in those lean years laid the groundwork for what would eventually become an international empire. And as the country slowly emerged from the economic catastrophe of the 1930s, unimaginable opportunity revealed itself on the roads ahead.
3 SOFT MARKET
Storytellers were nearly extinct, like whooping cranes, but the D.Q. was at least the right tide pool in which to observe the few that remained.
—LARRY MCMURTRY
On an unremarkable spring night in 2014, Warren Buffett, then the world’s third-richest person, did something more or less unremarkable and went to dinner at the Pool Room of the Four Seasons, one of the nicest restaurants in the world and one of the most exclusive landmarks in New York City. To put it mildly, the restaurant is no joke; culinary historians credit the Four Seasons with being one of the first kitchens to lend cultural capital to seasonal dining in the United States. In addition to luxe menus with rotating ingredients, the décor featured seasonal trees, ashtrays, and server uniforms. (In a 1959 issue, the countercultural Evergreen Review dubbed it “the most expensive restaurant ever built.”) In the decades before it closed in 2016, the Four Seasons stood perhaps singular in its place in New York City lore as the venue for the elite of all industries to go to and be seen; it’s where Kissinger, Oprah, and Oscar de la Renta might have had the same server on a given night. And as if that weren’t mythology enough, the origin of the term “power lunch” has actually been pinpointed to the restaurant’s jackets-required dining room.
On that April evening, according to the tabloids, Buffett ordered a steak. On the restaurant’s legendary bill of fare that could have been something